My name is Matthew and this is my blog. It's a personal blog and isn't affiliated with any of the companies I work for or have worked for in the past. Just to get that out of the way.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Make you work hard, make you spend hard, make you want her buffalo

To file under “Seeing the wood whilst surrounded by trees,” I spent some time earlier this week trying to figure out how to produce a sound effect I needed -– someone held in a sci-fi cell banging on the thick metal door. I had tried a couple of large pots from the kitchen and the metal part of the fireplace but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Taking a break for lunch I went out to the garage to get some bread from the freezer and was on my way back before I made a rather obvious realisation about where I might find a large metal door. There followed some strange looks from dog-walkers passing the house as I carefully closed myself, laptop computer, and microphones into the garage and spent ten minute banging on the door.

This last week has been pretty hectic, with Major Barbara playing for the last 4 nights at the theatre in Biggar and a whole lot of stuff to do on the Big Finish projects. Luckily there isn’t a whole lot of sound called for in Major Barbara, so I spent a lot of the time quietly working on Big Finish stuff whilst listening on headphones. Not being plugged into the internet really focuses the attention, I should try it at home.

The final version of "The Summer Of Love” made it’s way to the duplication plant towards the end of last week, and with a following wind should be out later this month. It wasn’t actually late, but it was close. I must make a mental note to not try to excuse my ability with deadlines by quoting Douglas Adams (“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”) or blaming a work ethic borrowed from Peter Gabriel ("We're intending to release in September - you see I never specify the year"). Suffice to say things are going better with the two current projects.

Today I really needed a break, last night I found myself unreasonably fed up with things; it can feel like going around in circles a bit after a while. Unfortunately this coincided with my discovery of an application that enables me to save stuff from YouTube on to my hard disc. Plus I like to think of time spent listening to things that happen in real life as research. Seriously though, past experience has taught me that if you are getting fed up with a project and continue trying to work on it the result is generally that there will be many re-dos.